Sweetbreads with mushrooms and Dog Point pinot noir

One of the great pleasures of living in Bristol over the past 15 years has been the friendship I’ve struck up with chef Stephen Markwick and his wife Judy.

In fact Stephen’s restaurant Culinaria - now sadly closed - is one of the reasons we moved to Redland, just a 10 minute walk away. I then went on to work on two books with him one of which, A Well-Run Kitchen is still in print and you can buy here.

Anyway I’m lucky enough to be invited to eat at their place from time to time and last week he cooked a mindblowingly good meal of sweetbreads with a creamy mushroom sauce with new potatoes and broad beans from his allotment. Knowing what he was making I took along a 2017 Dog Point pinot noir with which it went absolutely perfectly.

It’s tempting to feel that you need to drink a top burgundy with a classic dish like that but good New World pinot with a bit of bottle age often eclipses it - certainly for value. (The Wine Society is selling the 2019 vintage for £26 although the 2017, if you can find it, is more like £32)

By the way if you feel a bit squeamish about the idea of sweetbreads the umami-rich sauce, which is the key to the pairing, would work equally well with chicken.

For other good pinot matches see The best food pairings for pinot noir

Baked celeriac and blanc de blancs champagne

Not many producers take food and wine pairing as seriously as champagne house Gosset which sponsors an annual ‘Matchmakers’ competition for young sommeliers and chefs which was held at the Cordon Bleu's Cord restaurant in Fleet Street

The winners were Matthew Davison and Adam Eyre of Fischer’s at Baslow Hall in Derbyshire whose winning dish was an umami-rich dish of Orkney scallop with nori salt, baked celeriac, fermented ceps, XO sauce, umeboshi furikake, sliced nori and a reduced celeriac stock.

Scallops are a given with blanc de blancs champagne but it was the other elements that were particularly intriguing - the savoury ceps which had been foraged the previous year, the salty XO sauce but above all the rich, sweet earthy flavour of the baked celeriac and celeriac stock which was made from the celeriac peelings.

The teams also had to produce a dish to match the 2012 Grande Reserve based on a shopping basket of ingredients including Berkswell ewes' milk cheese. Fischer’s turned it into a an unctuous Berkswell and champagne sauce which was served with a mushroom and bean fricasée and again went brilliantly with the champagne.

Goes to show you don’t have to have meat in a dish to create a stellar champagne pairing.

I was invited to the competition by Gosset champagne.

Dumplings and grand cru Chablis

You might think dumplings were humble fare, not best suited to show off a great wine but as last week’s tasting lunch at Bob Bob Ricard proved, that’s not necessarily the case.

They laid on two from their largely Russian-inspired dinner menu - some lobster, crab and shrimp pelmeni which were served with a langoustine bisque and truffle, potato and mushroom vareniki (above) which came with a forest mushroom velouté.

Both were spectacularly good with a mature 2016 grand cru Chablis ‘Les Clos’ from Domaine Christian Moreau which sells for £100 on the list.

Of course it wasn’t the dumplings themselves that were the key to the match but the umami-rich fillings and soups in which they were served - shellfish on the one hand and mushrooms and truffles on the other.

And although the wine itself was expensive, at £10 for the mushroom dumplings and £14 for the loster ones, the dumplings are quite affordable.

Since wine is a feature of the restaurant it’s good to see a menu that’s designed to show it off.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of Bob Bob Ricard who obligingly supplied the very professional photos given that mine were a bit rubbish and wouldn't have encouraged you to try the combination out at all.

Champagne and pigs tails

Champagne, we all know, goes with practically everything but PIG TAILS? Surely not.

Well yes, if they’re in the capable hands of chef Rob Roy Cameron of Gazelle in Mayfair who hammers them out into fine crispy shards and partners them with Jerusalem artichokes (another champagne-loving ingredient) and a Manhattan jus. Fried things, as I’ve said before, go exceptionally well with bubbles - in fact I’m hard pushed to think of a still wine that would have partnered this clever dish better.

Two other matches among the small plates we sampled stood out with the champagne - (a rich, Benoit Lahaye Brut Nature): a dish of mushrooms with pine nuts and wild garlic (well, mushrooms flatter everything) and another umami-rich dish of squid with sandalwood cured jowl and girolles (yes, more mushrooms but the dish was more about the pork)

The pairing was the more surprising given that the restaurant heavily features cocktails devised by leading mixologist and co-owner Tony Conigliaro so I was expecting to drink them through the meal too but the negroni I ordered, while delicious, was just a bit too strong and sweet for the delicate flavours of the food.

We did however try one of the cocktail pairings in the bar upstairs: a Serafin (tequila, pear shrub, pear liqueur and ginger beer) which was perfect with a delicate crisp corn tostada and a champagne cocktail - the Twinkle, I think - with Grapefruit Goldy (whatever that is), citrus and champagne with what looked like an ice-cream wafer, but turned out to be frozen yeast and taste like frozen parmesan. (Cameron used to work for El Bulli.) Quite gorgeous.

I guess the champagne would have gone pretty well with that too.

I ate at Gazelle as a guest of the restaurant.